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Most artists, like most moths, are irresistibly drawn to the light. It’s the reason Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth and so many others swooped down on softly sunlit St Ives. It’s what drove David Hockney back to California in 2013 (the sun there, he says, is “10 times brighter” than the gloom of his native Bradford).

So why on earth would any artist want to spend a week living in a pitch black room?

“I’ve developed quite an affinity with the dark,” Sam Winston tells me, a little sheepishly. “If you say, ‘I like darkness’, people think ‘Oh, he’s a goth’. But actually, there’s something very deep, very biological in our reaction to it.”